The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Where They Are, and Their Politics

By Christopher Catherwood

In the changing political, social, and religious landscape of the West, the term evangelical is increasingly losing meaning and credibility. Although some people say there is no unity to what evangelicals believe, church historian Christopher Catherwood sets out to prove otherwise, stating, "We are a people defined by our beliefs, and that is what distinguishes us in our twenty-first century postmodern times." Catherwood delivers a succinct and organized review of the global evangelical movement, looking at its earliest days, current place in world Christianity, political and social influence, unifying theological doctrinal beliefs, and its view on eschatology.
Using the doctrinal basis of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students and the 1974 Lausanne Covenant, Catherwood summarizes evangelical beliefs before describing the scope of the global church and the shift of evangelicalism's center from the global North and West to the South and East. Catherwood demonstrates that the term evangelical is not only meaningful, but necessary. Anyone wanting to know about the past, present, and future of evangelicalism will find this book helpful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crossway Books
• Release date: Aug 4, 2010
• ISBN: 9781433522819

Christopher Catherwood

Christopher Catherwood (PhD, University of East Anglia) is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and member of both Churchill and St. Edmund's Colleges at Cambridge University. He was a fellow of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust in 2010 and medalist in 2014. Christopher lives in a village near Cambridge with his wife, Paulette.

Book preview

Bright, breezy, and wearing his learning lightly, historian Catherwood has crafted a most illuminating cross-sectional review of the global evangelical movement as it is today. I found it unputdownable; I think many others will too.

J. I. Packer, Professor of Theology, Regent College; author, Knowing God

Christopher Catherwood knows history, but not the dry and dusty kind. This book tells a living story in a lively way. It is a kind of ‘editorial meets story time.’ Christopher has all that you need to write a compelling book—style and information, specific examples and opinions. And he knows everyone! So this is not a dry ‘book for the ages’; this is a book for today. If you want to know who evangelicals are and what they’re about, this book will tell you—and this man knows what he’s talking about.

Mark Dever, Senior Pastor, Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington, DC

"The Evangelicals is a good book to give those who know of this purportedly weird tribe only from sensationalistic new stories. Christopher Catherwood’s easy-to-read style makes this introduction to evangelical thought and practice like a cup of chamomile tea at bedtime–and it won’t produce any nightmares."

Marvin Olasky, Editor-in-chief, World; Provost, King’s College, New York City

An eye-opening, stereotype-destroying account of worldwide evangelicalism. Catherwood demonstrates the breadth and dynamism of evangelicals and paints a quite different—and more accurate—picture of them than that often still embraced by secular academics and the secular media—and at times by evangelicals themselves.

Steve Monsma, Research Fellow, the Henry Institute

for the Study of Christianity and Politics, Calvin College;

author, Healing for a Broken World: Christian Perspectives on Public Policy

Christopher Catherwood’s insider credentials and global contacts make his a voice worth heeding in the evangelical movement. He offers a hopeful take on a God-graced phenomenon spreading worldwide. His critical take on distinctive American traits in evangelicalism will prompt serious reflection.

Collin Hansen, author of

Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists

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9781433504013_ebook_0004_001

The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Where They Are, and Their Politics

Copyright © 2010 by Christopher Catherwood

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

Published in association with the literary agency of RoperPenberthy Publishing Ltd., 19 Egerton Place, Weybidge, Surrey, KT13 0PF, England.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Interior design and typesetting: Lakeside Design Plus

Cover design and illustration: Tobias’ Outerwear for Books

First printing 2010

Printed in the United States of America

Trade Paperback ISBN:   978-1-4335-0401-3

PDF ISBN:                       978-1-4335-1247-6

Mobipocket ISBN:           978-1-4335-1248-3

ePub ISBN:                      978-1-4335-2281-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Catherwood, Christopher.

        The evangelicals : what they believe, where they are, and their politics / Christopher Catherwood.

                     p. cm.

        Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

        ISBN 978-1-4335-0401-3 (tp)

        1. Evangelicalism. I. Title.

BR1640.C38 2010

270.8'2—dc22

2010001690

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

VP        21     20     19     18    17   16   15    14    13     12    11     10

14    13    12     11      10      9      8      7      6     5     4     3    2       1

To Keith Weston,

former rector of St. Ebbe’s, Oxford,

and his wife Margaret

To Mark Ashton,

vicar of St. Andrew the Great, Cambridge,

and his wife Fiona

To Giles Walter,

vicar of St. John’s, Tunbridge Wells,

and his wife Sarah

And to my very favorite evangelical,

my wife,

Paulette

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Some Core Evangelical Beliefs

2. A Typical Evangelical Church’s Vision Statement

3. Who Are Evangelicals?

4. Evangelicals Past and Present

5. Trials and Tribulations

6. The Minefield: A Survey of Evangelical Politics

Afterword: The New Calvinism

Appendix: Pew Survey on Religion in the United States

Notes

Preface

A trendy new theory says that where you were raised influences the rest of your life. For example, Bill Gates lived near one of the few schools at the time that had a computer, and tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams were raised near one of the rare tennis courts in their part of Los Angeles.

I am not sure about whether this theory always works, but it can be applied to my own life. I was raised in an evangelical church in London that was one of the few at the time that had a very international congregation. People from every inhabited continent would come faithfully every Sunday, and this was back in the 1950s. (Today another high profile evangelical church in London, All Souls Church, Langham Place, has a congregation that is 45 percent from outside the United Kingdom, many members being from Africa, Asia, and Latin America).

Then from the ages of around eighteen to twenty-six I was involved in the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES). This really does have members from every inhabited part of the planet, and I would go each year as a British delegate to its international student conference, in Austria, where fellow students from dozens of different countries and continents would convene annually for two to three weeks at a time.

Now my wife and I attend a similarly internationally oriented church in Cambridge, itself a very cosmopolitan kind of place; the college that I use for my social base, St. Edmund’s, regularly has students from over sixty countries in any given academic year.

So in a real sense I have been raised with the tale I am telling in this book: that evangelicalism is truly a multinational, multicultural, interdenominational body of every race, social class, and political persuasion that one can imagine, and not the white, Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking, and politically far-to-the-right-of-center body that the press often describes it as being. Many Brazilian evangelicals have views that would put them almost on the Marxist end of the political spectrum, yet they can have fellowship with a white American who has voted Republican all of his or her life.

I have therefore been fascinated by the issues raised in this book since childhood, and have been actively involved in the wider evangelical world for over thirty-six years. In recent times authors such as Philip Jenkins have described the global evangelical renaissance in academic terms and have brought it to the attention of the university world, at least, if not to the media, where the old clichés still, alas, persist. But for me the astonishing growth of evangelicalism over the past few decades has paralleled my own life experience, as I visited fellow evangelicals in Central America, the Middle East, behind the Iron Curtain pre-1989, and in China and other parts of East Asia. What books now tell you are things I have seen with my own eyes.

Therefore when Richard Roper and Allan Fisher asked me to write this book, I was delighted to accept their offer in the hope that my readers would get a picture of what the evangelical world is really like as opposed to the rather distorted media view that is certainly based upon ignorance and probably upon strong bias as well.

I hope that my readers will end up as excited by one of the biggest global phenomena of the twenty-first century as I am. Enjoy the book!

Acknowledgments

For some strange reason, the most important person in the acknowledgments— the author’s spouse—is often left until the very end. This is a shame, and one that some of us in Cambridge have been careful to try to change in the books we write.

So I am therefore most happy to begin mine with my wife Paulette. She is my constant companion, best friend, muse, support, inspiration, lady from Proverbs (she descends, apart from anything else, from Virginian pioneer stock), and source of endless wisdom, love, and helpfulness. And that is only the beginning.

The idea for this book came from one of the most-liked people in the British Christian book trade, Richard Roper, someone who has been a firm friend now for well over a quarter of a century (yes, we are getting that old) and is still as instrumental in getting books into print as when I first met him as a novice in his first job all those years ago. My thanks to him, to his wife Grace, and to their family are long-lasting.

I am also blessed with my US publisher: editor Allan Fisher, whose joining Crossway some years back was splendid news to many of us authors, let alone to his new employer, and to that wonderful couple without whom Crossway would not be as it is today, Lane and Ebeth Dennis, who have so thankfully kept the faith when many have begun to slide. I will soon celebrate my silver anniversary as a Crossway author, and I am as grateful to them as ever.

The dedication is to some of those pastors, past and present, under whom I have had the privilege of sitting on many a Sunday since my first day as an undergraduate back in the 1970s. Keith and Margaret Weston at St. Ebbe’s in Oxford and Mark and Fiona Ashton at St. Andrew the Great in Cambridge, are, with Mark’s former curate, Giles Walter and his wife Sarah, models of what proper pastor and wife teams ought to be, whether based on biblical criteria or those of the more recent decrees of the Church of England (to whose original evangelical faith and doctrine all six have kept loyal). My thanks to all of them is profound.

When I signed the contract for this book, Mark Ashton was in glowing health. But when I was halfway through writing it, he was diagnosed with a particularly severe and usually inoperable form of cancer. By the time you read this he may no longer be alive. He has been my longest pastor—longer even than the great Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones of Westminster Chapel in London (my late maternal grandfather), who retired from that pulpit when I was thirteen. Mark has been my pastor for eighteen years, every day of which I have been grateful to God for the ministry that he has so faithfully carried out in Cambridge.

I also thank Dr. Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, whose church I have used and whose splendid 9 Marks of a Healthy Church program I have also used to show what a real evangelical church is, or certainly should be, like. Mark, along with his wife Connie, changed my life. Many years ago the two of them introduced me to an American friend of theirs called Paulette, and she is now my wife! So my thanks to Mark cannot be profound enough! Now he embodies what evangelical ministry should be all about in the United States in the same way that Mark Ashton has done for so long in Britain.

I could not be more blessed in my evangelical heritage. I am deeply thankful to my parents, Fred and Elizabeth Catherwood, who are not only models of all that concerned and godly Christian parents should be, but who through their work with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students for over sixty years have modeled what evangelical faith should be to thousands throughout those decades. Likewise I am grateful for my grandparents, Martyn and Bethan Lloyd-Jones, both no longer with us, but who in their own time showed the world what evangelicals should be.

I am most grateful to the weekly prayerful support of my home group at St. Andrew the Great. In addition to my wife, the members have been: Richard and Sally Reynolds, two wonderfully encouraging friends to whom my first bestseller (on Winston Churchill) is rightly dedicated; Derek Wright; our hosts Matthew and Sarah Burling, Jane Hollis, and Juliet Cook; and former home group members Falcon Green and Max and Julia Halbert. The staff of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students has been magnificent. I am especially indebted to Las Newman, the former acting general secretary and long-term staff member, and to Kirsty Thorburn, the administrator without whose unstinting hard work over many years things would never have happened. Warmest thanks to so great a team!

I am also thankful to those people on both sides of the Atlantic who receive my prayer e-mails—thank you for your prayerful long-distance support. My wife’s many friends in Virginia and my old friends from university days have been a splendid source of Christian fellowship and encouragement these past thirty-five years and more.

Cambridge University Library is an excellent repository of books, and I have profited from its copyright library status. I am grateful to the many places in Cambridge where I work and teach: St. Edmund’s College Cambridge, a place with many distinguished evangelicals on their fellowship who prove that international scientific eminence and evangelical faith are fully compatible (special thanks to the former master, Sir Brian Heap, an erstwhile foreign secretary and vice president of the Royal Society and former president of the Institute of Biology, as well as an outstanding evangelical thinker and ethicist); Homerton College Cambridge (where many of my students have been of firm evangelical faith); Churchill College Cambridge (where a strongly evangelical member of the archives staff was at the desk as I was writing this); and to the INSTEP program of several US universities on this side of the Big Pond, for whom I have the pleasure of teaching several courses (and where I have also had students of strong evangelical beliefs). Cambridge is sometimes nicknamed the Bible Belt of East Anglia, but it is also a place that proves that intellectual endeavor of the highest order and evangelicalism are firmly compatible, so that to live in such a place is a rare privilege.

I should say that the views expressed in this book are my own, and the appearance of people in these acknowledgments does not mean that they would agree with all that is written here.

One

Some Core Evangelical Beliefs

Let’s take what many Christians call a basis of faith to describe what specifically evangelical Christians believe. I have deliberately chosen to use an interdenominational statement of faith , since many such bases of faith are peculiar to a particular group. In other words, each denomination has its own individual sets of doctrine (as the Baptist joke goes, you can baptize people your way, and we will do it God’s way), whereas what follows is something believed in by evangelical Christians across all kinds of divergent groups: Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and many other Protestant groups.

I have chosen the doctrinal faith basis of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, a body which, as we shall see in chapter 3, has members in over 152 countries and is therefore multicultural and supranational; it has a presence on every continent, and is not restricted to just one country, as is the case with many Protestant denominations.¹

The central truths, as revealed in Scripture, include:

1. The unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the Godhead. This is what we call the doctrine of the Trinity, and it is one of the oldest and most distinctive Christian beliefs. It is vital because who Jesus is, what he came to do, and what he accomplished is at the heart of the Christian message—the evangel, or good news, from which the term evangelical, someone who both believes in and proclaims the evangel, gets its name. Jesus was no mere good man—he was and still is God the Son, part of the Trinity itself.

2. The sovereignty of God in creation, revelation, redemption, and final judgment. God is in charge, and we are all beholden to him. This is vital in all kinds of different ways; for example, it is why supporting the need for a clean environment is part and parcel of being a responsible Christian, since the Bible teaches that we are the stewards God mandated to look after his creation properly. In Britain Christians of all the different political persuasions support environmental responsibility, although, of course, there are diverse opinions on how this should best be implemented. The same is increasingly true in the United States as well as in what I will refer to in this book as the Two-thirds World, that is, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where most of the human race is living. This part of the

Reviews for The Evangelicals

[faithfulpolitics · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The definition of who is an Evangelical is actually quite simple. If you believe the Bible to be inspired and inerrant, that Jesus was the Son of God, that you need to have a born-again experience to go to Heaven, and that you should share your faith with others, chances are you are an Evangelical. But despite this simple definition, a perennial problem for Evangelicals in America is how misunderstood they are by the populace in general, and the media in particular. With an eye to clearing up some of this misunderstanding, Christopher Catherwood recently released an informative little book entitled, appropriately enough, The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Where They Are, And Their Politics. Catherwood’s work is a quick read—only 162 pages—that provides a good overview the defining characteristics of Evangelicalism. While those looking for an in-depth analysis of Evangelicalism should look elsewhere, The Evangelicals will help the beginner understand some of the distinctives of Evangelicalism. One of the main focuses for Catherwood is to show the key doctrines of the faith to which Evangelicals hold. Utilizing several different sources (including the Lausanne Covenant, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students’ statement of faith, and a sample of a British and American church’s respective vision statements) Catherwood paints a broad picture of what it means to be an Evangelical. Evangelicals have always been united around key doctrine, so it is important for someone attempting to understand Evangelicalism to recognize what those doctrines are. In this area The Evangelicals is a very beneficial read. However, one should keep in mind that Catherwood is writing from a Reformed perspective, so while he tries to maintain a balance in presentation, he does represent a particular slice of Evangelicals, not Evangelicalism in its entirety. Which brings us to the second caveat American readers should keep in mind. Catherwood is writing from England, and therefore reflects certain biases in his presentation despite his best efforts to understand American Evangelicalism. At points he can seem a little anti-American, and he is anti-George W. Bush throughout (I think he’s a little late to that party). For example, Catherwood goes to great lengths to describe how Bush damaged the world’s perception of Evangelicalism, which is certainly true in some sectors of the globe. But he makes very little of the former President’s AIDs relief funding to Africa, something the author clearly supports.As far as “where Evangelicals are,” Catherwood does a fine job of building off the work of Philip Jenkins and others, showing how the epicenter of Evangelicalism has been moving to the Global South for the past few decades, an often under-appreciated reality for those of us in America (Jenkins’ work, The Next Christendom is required reading for anyone interested in this phenomenon).Catherwood also includes a chapter on the eschatological (end-times) beliefs of Evangelicals. While it may seem out of place to give so much print space to this topic, it actually fits quite nicely with Catherwood’s theme. Views of the end-times are often one of the most misunderstood facets of Evangelicalism, even by Evangelicals themselves. Catherwood’s presentation of this aspect of theology is, once again, a good overview for someone attempting to become acquainted with Evangelicalism.Overall, this quick read is a good introduction on Evangelicalism. In places it may lack depth or nuance, something I’m sure the author could have added had he desired. But that weakness is also the book’s biggest strength. The Evangelicals does not get bogged down or overly academic. I highly recommend the work for anyone who is a beginner on the topic, or anyone seeking a quick refresher on one of the dominant strains of religion in the world today.